Read:
The Promise – Damon Galgut (Europa Editions Audio, 2022)
How It Went – Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 2022)
The Glass Hotel – Emily St. John Mandel (Harper Collins Publishers, 2020)
Around the Hearth – L.M. Montgomery (Nimbus Publishing, 2022)
The Colony – Audrey Magee (Farrer, Strauss, Giroux, 2022)
Cloud Cuckoo Land – Anthony Doerr (Scribner, 2021)
Women of Troy – Pat Barker (Doubleday, 2022)
Did Not Finish:
Luster – Raven Leilani
I tried this one on audio and didn’t get very far. Perhaps I would get along better in the written word but I also wasn’t a big fan of the main character. This seems like a classic Messy Woman style book and I don’t always have a lot of patience for those.
Currently Reading:
The Pull of the Stars – Emma Donoghue
The Marriage Portrait – Maggie O’Farrell
Thoughts:
I have a full Year in Review post coming so I’ll keep this short. December was a surprisingly good reading month for me! I read 7 books, which was a lot more than I expected in this busy month, and they were generally very excellent. The Glass Hotel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, and Women of Troy were all particularly good.
The next few books I hope to read are The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (longtime TBR, have this one from the library already), Where the Crawdads Sing (have a copy a friend loaned me), The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre (an ARC I am behind on), and The Sea of Tranquility (eager to read this one after finishing The Glass Hotel).
I’ll be back on Monday to take a look at my reading in 2022!
Karissa Reads Books 
I saw the movie version of Where the Crawdads Sing, and everyone says it’s so true to the book, including the author. I didn’t have the big Feels a lot of other folks had for it, and I think part of it was that the story seems largely directed toward an early-20’s female audience.
That Montgomery book came out in 2022?
I saw the movie with friends who had already read the book. They both liked it but said the book was better. I thought it was an enjoyable film but, no, I didn’t get any big Feels from it either and it hasn’t made me want to rush out to read the book.
Yes, the Montgomery book came out in 2022! I hadn’t heard anything about it, I just happened to come across it at the library. It’s a short story collection and I hadn’t read any of them. I meant to review it before Christmas and then things got crazy. Maybe I will try to still get to it.
I tried to read her short story collection called Among the Shadows (all ghost stories) and found it was more suited to a really, really young audience. I know Anne of Green Gables is for young readers, too, but this read more like middle school style to me.
I think collecting those stories and trying to present them as ghost stories was a bit of a disservice to them. Even as a sensitive young kid I never found them particularly frightening.